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Hard Drive Problem
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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18. April 2004 @ 17:06 |
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I have a western digital 250 gb hard drive although it reads at 232 gb. I went to perform disk cleanup on it and noticed that it only had 44.84 gb free and 184 gb used. I knew this was wrong but double checked.
On the drive I have 12 folders, Pictures, Programs, DVDs, Videos, Music, Games, Books, My Shared Folder, Download, Vice City Mods, and Login & Boot Screens. After adding up these folders I come up with 67.21 gb.
Now according to my math 232 - 67.21 = 164.70 not 44.84 So what happened to my extra space? I have system restore turned off, ran spybot, adware, and a virus scan and nothing came up. Also I have my OS on my other drive so I know that's not the problem. What can I do?
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chthomson
Member
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18. April 2004 @ 17:38 |
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Hi MuckMan
It sounds like the system is seeing your hard drive as a 120G not 250G.
How old is your system. Which operating system are you running. Is the drive formated NTFS.
Some systems do not see drives over 132G and one needs to configure it just right to make it work
I hope this helps
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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18. April 2004 @ 18:02 |
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The system is a 2.66 ghz Dell Dimension 4550 which I got a year ago. It's running XP professional and it is NTFS. I know that the system is reading it at 250G because when I go to Start>My Computer>LocalDisk D> Properties it says capacity 232G.
However could you please explain how to configure the system so that it reads the 250G?
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chthomson
Member
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18. April 2004 @ 18:20 |
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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18. April 2004 @ 19:32 |
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Yes I have emptied the Recycling Bin. I have 2 hidden folders, RECYCLER and System Volume Information.
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Veblin
Senior Member
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18. April 2004 @ 19:33 |
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It sounds to me like you need to check your disk for errors.
My computer
Right click on drive and select Properties.
Tools Tab - Error-checking.
You will probably want to check both options.
It can't do this full check and fix when Windows is running so it will ask you if
you want to do it the next time the computer is restarted.
Select Yes and then restart yor computer so the check and fix can be done.
This will take quite a while. Maybe a hour or two.
When the check is done it should have recovered any available space.
There is a possiblity that you might lose some data if you indexes are really messed up
but that data is probably already corrupt if there is a problem.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 18. April 2004 @ 20:55
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chthomson
Member
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18. April 2004 @ 20:11 |
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Hi MuckMan
When you first set up the drive was it setup with Western Digital's setup software or did you do it through the Computer Management tool in Windows.
Thanks
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Veblin
Senior Member
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18. April 2004 @ 20:49 |
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The reason I suggest a disk error check is because I have had similar problems before.
I had some DVD's ripped to the Hard Drive.
I later went to play one of the DVD rips and right in the middle a different DVD rip would play.
It would then switch back and forth between the two different DVD rips.
When I checked the used space on the drive it was far more than what was actually on the drive.
The free space was much less than what there should have been.
There was an error of about 18GB.
After running the error check with the fixing options checked I did get back the correct used and free space.
The DVD rips were still corrupt but the space was correct.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 18. April 2004 @ 20:52
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Xian
Senior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 05:37 |
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Misrepresented hard drive capactity was covered in another thread a while back.
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/62655
My comments from there:
Misrepresented hard drive capacity has been an issue for years. Earlier this year a class action lawsuit was filed in LA over it: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112558,00.asp
Hard drive manufacturers count a kilobyte as 1000, not 1024, so that is where the discrepancy is.
Computers count a kilobyte as 1024 so you get the difference depending on whether you divide by 1000 or by 1024.
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Veblin
Senior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 06:57 |
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Yes, what a manufacturer labels the hard drive capacity as and what the actual capacity is are two different things.
But that doesn't account for the difference between what is actually used space on the drive and what the drive is reporting as being used.
Windows can see the actual capacity of the drive but that drive is incorrectly reporting the used space on that drive.
That is typical of drive errors that I have seen.
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AfterDawn Addict
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19. April 2004 @ 07:16 |
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Hi Muckman, Read a post awhile back like this. Seems the lost space was caused by Norton Anti Virus storing deleted video file somewhere like another recycle bin. I don't use Norton so I'm not sure how to do it but Norton had to be emptied somewhere. I don't know if you are using Norton, but thought I would pass this along just in case.
Jerry
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Veblin
Senior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 07:56 |
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Norton Anti-Virus doesn't store deleted files.
Norton System Works can have a Protected Recycle Bin that does save some deleted files and uses space.
It can make the used and free space report incorrectly, but usually just a few GB and not 120GB off.
If you have that you can empty the protected files to get back some space.
You can also adjust the amount of space used for the Protected Recycle Bin or turn it off completely.
XP's System Restore or a program like GoBack will also use some disk space.
The space they use can be adjusted also, but they usually don't cause the used and free space to report incorrectly.
I don't know that any of those things will cause this large of a difference in the used and free space reported.
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Xian
Senior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 08:19 |
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Sorry, just skimmed the topic and thought it was about another issue when you said "However could you please explain how to configure the system so that it reads the 250G?".
chthomson seems to have hit the most likely scenerio - Windows is only seeing it as 120G even though the bios reports the true capacity. One possiblity is that you do not have Windows XP SP1 installed, or if it is installed you didn't make the registry changes to get it to recognize 48 bit LBA. By default, WinXP only sees a 137G as the maximum size unless you make the changes. See the MS Knowledge Base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 12:11 |
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I went back and reinstalled the drivers for the Ultra ATA Controller card. I also ran disk cleanup. After it finished it said that the second sector of the disk was unwriteable and then took me to my welcome screen.
I have Norton System Works installed as well and just purged the protected files. This got me 12G back so now I'm up to 60G but I'm still missing about 105G.
Should I just uninstall Norton System Works?
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Veblin
Senior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 14:09 |
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You could disable the Norton Protected Recycle bin until you figure out your problem.
Did you use the Data Lifeguard Tools when you installed the drive?
Have you tried running Diagnostic Utilities or Data Lifeguard Diagnostics?
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 14:58 |
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No I didn't use Data Lifeguard Tools when I installed the drive. How does one disable Norton Protected Recycling Bin?
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chthomson
Member
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19. April 2004 @ 17:14 |
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Hi MuckMan
Quote:
After it finished it said that the second sector of the disk was unwriteable and then took me to my welcome screen.
This may be the key to your problem. Can you move your data to another drive. If so back up your drive - boot to the Data Lifeguard Tools and run them. You may have a defective drive and the results of the tests will confirm .
I hope this helps
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 19. April 2004 @ 17:17
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MuckMan
Junior Member
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19. April 2004 @ 17:24 |
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I just ran the Data Lifeguard Tools and it said that I have no errors.
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AfterDawn Addict
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21. April 2004 @ 14:51 |
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might have been how the disk was partitioned..
if you used a windows 98 boot disk and fdisk, it inaccurately shows the size of the harddrive for some technical reason that i don't know of.. but what i do is i just create a nice old 15-20gb partition to install my os on and then create the other ones in xp by going to>
Right Click "My Computer" > Manage > Disk Management
This way your partitions get set correctly...
just a random thought..
peace
seamonkey420
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chthomson
Member
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21. April 2004 @ 18:30 |
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Hi MuckMan
Correct me if I am wrong
Windows reports the drive as 232 gb
Bios reports the drive as 250 gb
Data Lifeguard Tools reports the drive as 232 gb
If correct, it is time to reformat and start over again
I hope this helps
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kwhiz01
Newbie
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23. April 2004 @ 03:55 |
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I have exactly the same problem with a Western Digital brand new 160 gig hard drive. When I try to NTFS format it, I get the error message"The second NTFS boot sector is unwriteable". The history on this drive is that the WD software boot CD would not work. Called WD and they said to install Windows XP and that would format it. I did but that also created some other problems so had to reformat the drive. That is when I get the error message. I can format it as a FAT32 drive with no problems. I partioned the FAt32 drive into 125 gigs and 25 gigs and tried to format the 25 gig partition as NTFS. Succeeded but only had 6 gig free space (don't know where the 19 gigs went-overhead was supposedly only 90 megs) so went back to FAT32.
Befuddles
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kwhiz01
Newbie
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23. April 2004 @ 04:08 |
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Further to my earlier post. The small FAT32 partition that I created could be used normally--created folders, etc. Later (hours) after a reboot, I could use the folders i had created but could not create new ones. Error message was "Invalid folder name or path or folder already exists. The larger partion seemed to wrk fine, just the smaller one had the probelm. I could repeat this situation at will. So now I have just one 160 gig FAT32 partion on the dive. by the way, here is a URL related to the initial problem http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/w2kmsgs/2413.asp
Befuddles
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kwhiz01
Newbie
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26. April 2004 @ 10:28 |
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After mushing asround, i decided to just partition my hard drive and format each partition as NTFS. I found that I could make 2 60 gigs and 1 30 gig partition with no problem. Don't know why I couldn't make a single 152 gig partition.
Befuddles
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chthomson
Member
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26. April 2004 @ 11:28 |
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Hi kwhiz01
From what I understand with any hard drive larger than 137 GB to correctly work a few details need to be in place.
1 - The motherboard / Bios must support 137 GB + hard drive
2 - Windows XP with SP1 update installed
I have successfully installed 2 160 GB hard drives into 2 different machines as secondary drives. I have yet to install as a primary drive.
I hope this helps
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